Privatization Center To Seek Balanced View of Vouchers

Should the new National Center for the Study of Privatization in
Education be "neutral" on the subject of vouchers? Or is a
"dispassionate" position more appropriate? What about "balanced,"
"unbiased," or "objective"?

The discussion was more than academic for the 110 participants at
the center's inaugural conference at Teachers College, Columbia
University. The center hopes to become the nation's best source of
information on the politically charged issue of vouchers, and its
success depends in large part on whether it can avoid a perception of
bias.

"We have conservatives who have looked at voucher programs and never
found one that didn't work, and liberals who never found one that did
work," said Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College, which is
hosting the new center. "It's time that we gave this issue an unbiased
look."

Most of the professors, researchers, teachers' union members,
business entrepreneurs, and journalists who attended the April 9-10
conference here agreed that the center's goal is a worthy one. But many
questioned whether it can be achieved.

Maintaining neutrality will be "incredibly difficult," predicted Lee
Mitgang, a former education reporter for The Associated Press, who
spoke on the news media's coverage of vouchers.

Mr. Mitgang, now an independent educational and editorial
consultant, said that no matter what the center does, "I think you can
count on partisans on either side of the voucher debate characterizing
this center as friend or foe."

Henry M. Levin, the center's director, acknowledged during the
conference's opening remarks that the prospect of such reactions was a
concern.

"The question I have been asked [about the center] many times is,
'Can it be done?' " said Mr. Levin, who is retiring this year from
Stanford University, where he has taught education and economics for 31
years. ("Levin To Launch Privatization
Center at Columbia," April 7, 1999.)

He insisted that it can, and added that he is the right person to
direct the center. After three decades of thinking about vouchers, he
said, "basically where I am is confused, mixed, and undecided, which is
probably appropriate."

For the record, Mr. Levin described the center's mission as
providing a "balanced" look at vouchers. Mr. Mitgang said he preferred
the term "dispassionate." Frank Newman, the president of the Education
Commission of the States, disagreed, advising Mr. Levin to be
"objective."

"You don't want to be neutral," Mr. Newman said. "You want to be
objective. Some things are right, and some things are wrong."

Different Priorities

At one session, Mr. Levin offered some insight into how the center
will acknowledge the divergent points of view on vouchers.

He described four "dimensions" through which the issue can be
addressed: freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social
cohesion.

Conservatives, Mr. Levin said, tend to be more interested in the
first two dimensions. They generally support vouchers as a way to help
parents determine which school their children attend, and believe that
the competition resulting from vouchers will make schools more
efficient.

Liberals, meanwhile, tend to worry that vouchers will benefit
certain groups of students more than others, and that they will lead to
racial resegregation, Mr. Levin said.

Those predispositions are critical to evaluating a voucher program's
success, he argued, because "certain results are more important to some
people than others."

For example, someone whose main priority is freedom of choice would
probably be "willing to take a little inefficiency," Mr. Levin said.
Likewise, someone whose main priority is social cohesion might object
to vouchers if they greatly improved achievement but also resulted in
resegregation.

Mr. Levin said the center's specific activities will include a World
Wide Web site that will provide a compilation of studies on voucher
programs, as well as updates on relevant legislation in the states.

The center also plans to establish a set of criteria for evaluating
voucher studies, Mr. Levin said. "We will take the findings and say,
'These seem to be well-supported, these have very little support.'
"

Eventually, the center will commission research, probably in
partnership with other groups.

At least for the next few years, Mr. Levin said, the center will
concentrate on vouchers rather than the full range of "privatization"
issues in education, as the center's name would seem to
imply.

'Incredible Debate'

The main purpose of the conference was to identify topics that
deserve further study. Speakers suggested research on everything from
the legal status of vouchers to their effect on the poor.

One of the most provocative discussions concerned the amount of
information parents need to make smart decisions about school
choice.

"There is incredible debate about how much information we should
expect parents to have," said Mark Schneider, the chairman of the
political science department at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook.

"If we say every parent has to be informed, if we say every parent
has to have pinpoint knowledge, we're always going to find parents and
school choice wanting," he argued. "Those standards are wrong."

But no one knows what is an acceptable percentage of informed
parents, how much they should know, or even how the information can be
conveyed, Mr. Schneider added.

Most parents say "good teachers" are the most important factor in
choosing a school, he noted. "But I'll be damned if I know how to
measure good teachers."

Vol. 18, Issue 32, Page 11

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